Everywhere, reasons to be angry
And then I remember – I haven’t changed my HRT patch
“The Nightmare”, 1781, Henry Fuseli (held in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, image in the public domain)
A big feature article due in a week. A stadium concert sends apocalyptic echoes through the neighbourhood for two nights. The new milk is curdled. Caterpillars chew up the basil seedlings (and the kale and the mint and the perilla). The rotting 20-year-old outdoor teak table finally collapses. The camellia dies. Bills aren’t paid, tax isn’t separated from income, pitches for new stories aren’t sent to editors to safeguard future income, emails aren’t answered. The gym isn’t visited. Tumbleweeds of dust assemble in the hallway. The iPhone refuses to take voicemail messages. The dog is restless and demands three walks a day. The dog’s fur lifts as a car sails centimetres away through a pedestrian crossing. A gardener cleans a path next to a garden bed outside an open bedroom window with a leaf-blower and whooshes up a flurry of soil and dust that settles over the room like an art installation; the carpet near the window is a shadowy study, white sheets turn grey, a book lifted off the bedside table leaves the impression of a white box framed with black, a white box, a metaphor for something, who knows what.
The new vacuum cleaner is silent, not a murmur, refuses even to sigh when it is asked to address the issue.
My week. Anger builds. About the banal irritations all of us have to deal with every day. (How lucky we are.)
One afternoon during the week, through a very, very odd Fake-related set of circumstances, I go to meet a woman who was in a relationship with a bloke at the same time I briefly dated him more than a decade ago. Not the “Joe” of Fake but yet another small-weak-dishonest-flea-man, let’s call him “Ned”, a man before Joe… 🤢
Through those brief encounters with Ned I had no idea he had a partner. The woman’s stories about her experiences with him are hair-raising, he turned her life into a nightmare. I am grateful I lost nothing to Ned-the-small-weak-dishonest-flea-man with whom I had maybe three (very) lame sort-of dates but my anger builds. As do the emails in my inbox: in the months since Fake launched on Paramount+ another 50 or so messages have landed in my inbox from women telling me stories about their nightmare experiences with small-weak-dishonest-flea-men like Joe and Ned. If your message is among them, apologies, I simply haven’t the time nor the emotional bandwidth to formulate any useful reply but my best wishes go to you. (And, something I know for sure – Joe and Ned-flea-men have no future.)
Anger builds.
Proportion is lost, small things become big, the news is traumatic, anger builds – anger that is scratchy and itchy and escalating until you feel like your heart is beating outside your chest like a stadium concert and you have blowflies crawling under your skin and you want to fling your obsessive dog, who has not taken her eyes off you in days, over the back fence. (NO! Of course I would never! She’s curled up happily next to me right now on the couch as I write!)
As I consider my anger, I think then that, aside from small-weak-dishonest-flea-men who are beyond my power to fix (but whose futures are limited), part of the issue is that the more stuff we have – smartphones and vacuum cleaners and god knows what else – the more frustration we add to our lives … breakdowns, repairs, cost, time. Then I remember something else – I need to change my HRT patch. It likely accounts for at least some of my rage.
Forgive me this segueway into a public-service announcement – while I have a supply now, over the past year it has been a struggle to actually get the HRT medication I need.
Transdermal HRT patches Estradot and Estraderm have been hard to come by in Australia. According to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), the shortages are due to manufacturing issues. (The discontinuation of the Climara brand of patches in 2023 has contributed to the problem.) According to the TGA, normal supplies of Estraderm will resume in November and Estradot in January. (Supply issues with the brand Estalis have apparently been resolved.) This has been an ongoing for some months now; in an article on the ABC website in March, one pharmacist noted:
“These women who we’re talking about, they’re contributing members of society – hardworking, amazing women. They’re not out there to just pop pills or take medication for no reason. They're seeking treatment from their doctor because it’s having a massive impact on their day-to-day life and it’s critical that we recognise that.”
A woman pharmacist at my regular pharmacy observed recently that if it were a drug for a men’s health issue, there’d either be no shortages or it would be headline news until it was resolved. (Excellent, more reasons to be angry.)
When I posted on Facebook about the issue, a number of women chimed in with thoughts about the problem. Among the comments:
“I use the estrogen gel (Estrogel) and haven’t had a problem with supply, even in regional NSW”.
“omg - bloody HRT patches! We endure capitalism EVERY day and for those of us lucky enough to afford them, ‘they’ can’t get their act together and … deny us what is holding our sanity together. Not a good idea, we may need an uprising.”
“The patches issue has been such a problem, many many months without them, having to switch over to a pill and gel which I didn’t gel with, patches back again, then this week, my pharmacy didn’t have any. I had to shop around. They assured [me] that the problem was over for these ones that I am on two months ago, then they disappear again. There have been a whole swag of HRT patches missing, but also many other literally life saving medications. It’s a massive problem.”
“I gave up and moved over to pump gel, but recently discovered sachet gel options (note, the sachets apparently impart slightly more than a pump so don't overdo them or you end up with a PERIOD at the age of 56, geeeez).”
Meanwhile, a Senate Inquiry report into issues related to menopause and perimenopause was released in September. (PDF here.) I haven’t had time to read it but the introduction’s very first point hints at some of the anger that submissions to the inquiry might have shared:
“From reproductive health to menopause, women’s experiences are too often ignored and their concerns easily dismissed. Previous inquiries by this committee have highlighted the substandard level of care that some women may experience in their health journey.”
Additionally, the inquiry’s chapter list suggests some interesting content (for example, under the head “the experience of menopause and perimenopause” are sub-heads including “the sandwich generation” and “stigma and taboo”). The report’s recommendations include that medical degrees should include more education about perimenopause and menopause and women experiencing menopause need more workplace flexibility.
And, in other menopause news: an article in The Sydney Morning Herald this week warns women against turning to “fractional carbon dioxide (CO₂) laser therapies, sold under names such as MonaLisa Touch and FemiLift” to treat symptoms of menopause. The treatments, which “target symptoms including dryness, itching, urinary urgency and painful intercourse”, can cost thousands of dollars yet studies have found they are no more effective than a placebo.
Postscript: Eventually, I discovered that, plugged into another power outlet, my vacuum cleaner was functional. I called out an electrician. (How do you get out of that part of the contract which seems to require that you to listen to a tradie’s dull stories and waste your own income-earning time and potential to get your issue fixed? Would you like to know about this particular electrician’s issues with his own home renovation because I can fucking tell you all about them.) When this man had finished his gas-bagging, he did some tests on powerpoints and the appliances plugged into them, then told me that it was my 20-year-old washing machine tripping the fuse board that was the problem, not my vacuum cleaner, and that there would be no point repairing it (I have already paid for it to be repaired several times) and I needed a new washing machine. Then he told me that my fuse box (in a former owner’s dodgy kitchen cupboard reno) is actually illegal and will cost me $3000 to make compliant. Then he charged me nearly $200 for the call-out fee. Then he gas-bagged a bit more. I will, in future, be bolder, colder, tougher. “Thanks mate, piss off.” I also have another plan: I intend to remove all electricity and electrical devices from my apartment. I plan to live by candlelight. I will cook over a fire. I will wash my clothes in a stream.
🎵Mood
I keep coming back to Joni. Such a beautiful song. I didn’t recall its role in Love Actually (here to remind you); in this Financial Times article, some background to the song. “[She] first started singing the song in the folk clubs of Philadelphia in 1966.”
Wild thing
For an antidote to all the darkness – this, small, perfectly formed thing, “The Passion and Puppetry of Ronnie Burkett”. Says the Canadian puppeteer: “For me, when I found puppets, it was about shrinking a world that I found very confusing and I still do. By shrinking it to a manageable size I can examine it almost like a laboratory … we need a beautiful cry and a belly laugh to anchor us to our humanity.” And, oh, his creation Esmé Massengill, how I love her in all her Norma Desmond-esque fabulousness!
Reading
SEX: The viral story of the week, on the Substack “Matriarchal Blessing”, Celeste Davis asks the question – “Do you not like sex or do you just not like patriarchal sex?” Davis quotes one woman she interviewed: “ ‘Interestingly once sex was off the table in our relationship, it made this space for me to think about it for myself. I was so busy thinking about him I never felt like I had the space to think about sex for me in my life – ‘do even like this? Do I want this? Is this an important part of my life FOR ME? Apart from him?’ .”
YOUNG WOMEN: On Threads this week, someone posted a note saying they had sat next to a young woman on a recent flight and she had spent most of the time video-ing herself eating. The poster was bemused. In yet more “WTF”, this article might explain what the person witnessed – “the internet is obsessed with watching pretty girls eat”. (Just so you know!)
OLIVER SACKS: I loved this story in The New York Times about the late brilliant neurologist and author Oliver Sacks (author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat). Written by Sacks’ partner in later life, writer Bill Hayes (his book. Insomniac City: New York, Oliver Sacks, and Me is wonderful), the article is a prelude to a forthcoming volume of Sacks’ letters and explores his life-long self-doubt. It includes great excerpts from his letters in the article including to lovers and colleagues, to his favourite aunt and to a college student who wrote to him about her bipolar disorder: “You are an individual – unique – with gifts and genes which no one else in the world exactly duplicates – and that means you have a true place and role in evolution, and in the present. That you have bipolar disorder, in a sense are bipolar, does not begin to encompass the whole of you – it is a what, while you are a you,” Sacks told her.
PUPPIES: She had me at “seven puppies”: in her Substack, “White Ink”, Anna Wharton explores what breeding from her Fox Red Labrador has taught her, including:
“It’s not that I deliberately want to make my life harder, I just want to live and experience and often that involves taking on risk rather than keeping things safe. I feel this makes me more resilient when the metaphorical shit hits the fan …”
“You take more risks as a single person: What you miss out on in terms of emotional and physical support and company on the sofa, you make up with by forcing yourself to be less cautious about the world…”
“… sharing joy just makes more of it. It is half term next week and I’ve lost count of the number of children I have invited over to see the pups before they go.”
SHIT: Catching up on this, God, it’s just fucking wonderful. “Now we are 60” (well, not quite yet) by Lisa Renee, author of the Substack “The Long Middle”: “A snapshot of 60: I have rug burns on my knees. The reason is not interesting. I’ve been on my knees scrubbing my father’s rough carpet after an unspeakable explosive accident. He stood nearby with his walker, apologizing profusely and insisting that I shouldn’t have to deal with my father’s shit. But this is 60. Dealing with my father’s shit. I’ve been doing it, literally and metaphorically, for five years now.”
PLUS:
BOOKS: On Threads, medical anthropologist and writer Dr Theresa Macphail (author of Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies In a Changing World and currently working on a book about ageing) asked the above question and got a flood of answers. Among some of the recurring titles: The Outline Trilogy by Rachel Cusk, Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo, and Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. Also, in The New Yorker, an analysis of new books exploring “the erotic reawakening of older women” (but which “also reflect the uneasiness that such women inspire – in others and in themselves”🤨).
Watching
Season 3 of Fisk has landed on the ABC. Could not be happier. Comedian Kitty Flanagan, who created the show and stars as the punctilious suburban lawyer Helen Tudor-Fisk, originally struggled to get backing for it. Last year, Fisk was in the Netflix top 10 in multiple countries, including South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. “You have to just be persistent,” Flanagan says. “You just have to keep pushing and go, ‘Oh well, that fell over. Let’s try again.’ ”
Beautiful thing
You have to be super careful these days not to be conned by AI imagery … don’t believe anything you see … I’ve checked this out though and I think it’s real. A “Hippocampus bargibanti (or Bargibant’s Pygmy Seahorse),” says the free-diving photographer of this wonderful video who must have used a serious macro lens. “[It’s] absolutely tiny, and a fully grown individual is no larger than the size of a human fingernail!” More from the Australian Museum on this treasure.
Food
PRAWNS: On his Instagram account, chef Neil Perry opens a box of premium wild-caught Skull Island prawns. Perry uses the prawns in his Qantas first and business class menus but they are now available for home delivery. “Sounds like an awesome idea for Christmas but I’m sure you will get them all the time,” he says. At $200 for a 3kg box (nearly $70/kg), I think not all the time, Neil-not-of-the-real-world.
GRAINS: In The New York Times, chef Marcus Samuelsson on food in the real world and the grain he thinks should be the next quinoa – millet. “As climate change threatens the availability of global staples like wheat, rice and potatoes, we must diversify what’s on the plate. And not just for our own consumption. Crops such as millet, teff and fonio can provide a lifeline for farming families struggling to make it from season to season. … The more I cook with African ingredients at home in Harlem, the more integral they’ve become to my everyday diet. I love making oatmeal and risotto with millet for my two children. I also use teff flour as a gluten-free and high-fiber substitute for all-purpose wheat flour.” (A quick search and I found this … shouldn’t be too hard to buy millet.)
MUSHROOMS: I mentioned I wanted to try this dish last week … I did. It’s so good! In addition to lettuce, I wrapped the mushrooms (with some Japanese rice) in perilla leaves from my garden. I may have drizzled a little kewpie mayo over the top too. (Hetty Lui McKinnon shared the dish on her Substack during Chinese New Year in February. It was interesting to read her thoughts on deep frying: “The smell of oil is an indulgence I rarely allow myself. The scent is my portal to protected memories, ones so special that I only allow myself to experience them a few times a year. Experiences become less special if you indulge in them all the time, and hence I keep this one scarce.”)
CURED PORK: On Martha Stewart’s website, a neat guide to cured pork products: learn your pancetta from your bacon, your prosciutto from your guanciale (I could live on it) from your lardo.
PANCAKES: These, now, please. Lemon ricotta pancakes with sautéed apples. Recipe here.
Travel
THAILAND: Early last year I was incredibly lucky to be the guest of the remarkable Sydney-born chef David Thompson on a food trip to Thailand. To catch you up: David is a fluent Thai speaker, interpreter of Thailand’s food history and culture, author of the famous pink book, Thai Food, and first-ever chef to be awarded a Michelin star for a Thai restaurant (at Nahm in London). These days he operates Long Chim (in Sydney, Perth and Riyadh); the wonderful Aksorn in Bangkok; and in September opened his latest restaurant, the Chop Chop Cook Shop, in the city’s Chinatown. (Above: Aksorn’s red curry of duck with longans, green chilli and coconut cream, courtesy of Aksorn; the restaurant’s Insta account is glorious.)
It was my second time in Thailand with David and his husband, Tanongsak Yordwai, and, predictably, the trip and the food were extraordinary. What masquerades as Thai food elsewhere bears little resemblance to Thai food in Thailand (it is incredible) and David seeks out the most arcane, the most unusual and the most delicious for his guests.
The English food writer Tom Parker Bowles, Queen Camilla’s son, was a member of our small group and he was a warm, down-to-earth delight. (I’ve decided Camilla must be amazing … his stories of how she calmly managed his, ahem, experimental and wayward teenage years were very funny and, when he made a comment about “my stepfather”, my head did a 360-degree swivel!) I’ve just stumbled on Tom’s story from the trip, published in Condé Nast Traveller and in which he writes of his love for Thailand and its food and his multiple trips over the years (he’s a wonderful writer). “I’ve come back again and again, travelling with Thompson and Yordwai, up to the ‘gutsy, jungly’ stuff of the north and down to the south, with its fearsomely fresh seafood, fiery turmeric-stained curries, and stir-fries of startling heat. I’ve gone to Bangkok and the Central Plain for prawns and sour soups, orange curries, and a taste of refined palace cuisine.”
Plus: Here’s my story about the trip in Good Weekend (published last year, scroll down to the middle of this anthology of experiences to find it (in the first line of the story a word has been dropped out 😫 should read, “between heaven and earth”).
If you’re going to Bangkok, as a starter pack of eating experiences, I’d suggest Aksorn, Haawm, Err Urban Rustic Thai and, as Parker Bowles suggests too, Nai Mong Hoi Thod for the stunning oyster omelette. I’d be trying out the Chop Chop Cookshop too! (Another stunning Insta account!)
HIKES: In the excellent Outside online magazine, the “13 Best Hut-to-Hut Hikes in the World” (want to do them all!). Includes Laugavegur Trail, Iceland (“traverses volcanic moonscape slopes freckled with obsidian and plunges into deep green valleys filled with mirror-clear tarns”), the Kumano Kodo south of Osaka in Japan (“a network of footpaths that crisscross the deeply wooded region, passing ancient Shinto shrines and temples, edging past misty waterfalls … and wending through tiny villages”), and, of course, Tasmania’s Overland Track. (Picture above: Jotunheimen National Park in Norway, courtesy of Visit Jotunheimen.)
NORWAY: Visit Norway has released this weird but entertaining ad, targeting a neglected demographic – gangs of middle-aged women having hot flushes (“… menopause, nature’s sick way of showing gratitude …”) I suspect we’ll see more like it.
PROVENCE: In the (aspirational) YOLO Journal, how Emilie Johnson made the move from New York-based corporate life to (more than) a year in Provence. Says YOLO: “Now a writer, photographer and avid yogi, Emilie lives an inspiringly barefoot life with her young family in the Provençal countryside. Luckily, she’s sharing how she made the leap and what she wishes she’d known beforehand – just in case there are any bastides you’ve got your eye on.”
Home and garden
SUSTAINABLE: So excited to see my brilliant friend Kerryn Burgess’s Kyneton renovation on The Design Files. She bought the 1950s house in near-original condition more than a decade ago and, with the help of Outlier Studio, has turned it into something really special and sustainable. What the article doesn’t say enough about though is Kerryn’s wonderful garden which she created almost single-handedly from nothing and which includes an espaliered orchard, rainwater tanks, composting bays and reclaimed brick paving. (Some glimpses on Kerryn’s Instagram account.) Ever in awe of my friend!
RIVERSIDE: I could equally include this Devon riverside cabin in my Travel section above because it’s available to rent but instead, I’m sending it straight to the top of my if-I-ever-have-a-country-cottage-it-should-look-like-this-and-be-in-an-environment-like-this list. What heaven.
SPA DECK: A cedar hot tub and a cold plunge pool recessed into a deck at a Modernist Brooklyn townhouse.
Socials
(via Instagram; more here)
(via Threads, some great comments on the post too; I’m watching way more US presidential coverage than is healthy)
(via Threads; more here – “The Daily Beast has learned that even Will Lewis, Bezos’s hand-picked publisher, fought Bezos ‘tooth and nail’ from squelching the prepared editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for president.”
(via Instagram; more here)
(Via Threads; more here.)
(via Threads; full story here)
(via Threads; more about the Lidia Thorpe story which has flown around the world here)
(via Threads; more here, and here)
(via Threads; story here, no question, it’s in our bodies/lungs too)
Stolen words
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. … Health and salvation can be found only in motion... if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”–Danish philosopher and theologian, Søren Kierkegaard (in Letters and Documents).
What a wonderful summary of the multiple challenges we face as women all the time. Loved it Stephanie. You're a legend for being brave enough to articulate our too-numerous frustrations. Love your work. Xx
So. Much. Juicy. Content. Thank you. HRT, anger and FISK. I feel seen! Smiled all the way through to the the teeny tiny seahorse 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻